Assessment of E-coding practices and costs in Massachusetts hospitals.

Hospital discharge data are a potentially useful information resource for documenting the epidemiology of nonfatal injuries.

However, hospitals often do not include E-codes that identify external causes of injury in discharge abstracts.

One barrier has been assumed to be the cost of assigning E-codes to medical records.

Directors of medical records at hospitals in Massachusetts were surveyed to assess the validity of a cost-assessment study by Rivara and coworkers and to determine what resources they would need to E-code all injury discharges.

A ccording to Rivara's estimates, injury coding an additional 500 hospital discharges would entail a continuing cost to each hospital of about $600 a year.